Tolstoy felt demeaned by the desire he felt for his wife, and his novella, inspired by Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata, draws on this. It has been brilliantly adapted by Nancy Harris (with sensitive musical intervention by Harry Sever – and Beethoven). The Kreutzer Sonata is 90 minutes of theatre that will keep you fascinated, absorbed and progressively horrified. Like a member of a jury, you listen to what begins in a railway compartment as Pozdnyshev, a battered, deceptively genial fellow in clerical grey – a phenomenal performance by Greg Hicks – embarks on a confessional marathon, directed with flair by John Terry.
What did Tolstoy not understand about unhappy marriages? Although written in 1889, the piece’s nuanced violence rings true in 2016. Hicks’s Pozdnyshev has an abject worldliness, often speaking as if in inverted commas or laughing mirthlessly, a man who knows he must hold himself at a distance. It is marvellous to watch the journey of Hicks’s hands, the pulling at his fingertips, the rubbing that comes close to wringing, the banishing behind his back. He is lewd – and lost. His wife, he tells us, had the “look and smell of a large overripe peach”. His misogyny is matched only by his masochism as he constructs the fantasy that she, an amateur pianist, is having an affair with Troukhatchevsky, the violinist who accompanies her. Jealousy will find its own fuel to burn.
Watching Pozdnyshev lose himself is as tormenting as watching Othello, but different because Pozdnyshev is the exclusive author of his downfall. Alice Pinto at the piano and Phillip Granell on violin are on a raised stage behind Pozdnyshev – in costume, yet impassive. Their detachment is key – the music is victoriously theirs, the drama will always be Pozdnyshev’s.
